Police in Northern Ireland questioned Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams yesterday after arresting him under an investigation into one of the province’s most notorious murders, a move that sent political shockwaves through Belfast and Dublin.
Reviled by many in Britain as the spokesman for the Irish Republican Army in the 1980s, Adams reinvented himself as a Northern Ireland peacemaker and then as a populist opposition politician in the Irish parliament.
His Sinn Fein party said he was arrested on Wednesday evening by police investigating the 1972 abduction and murder of Jean McConville, a mother of 10 children. Under British anti-terrorism laws, a suspect can be held for up to 28 days before being charged.
Adams, 65, who has always denied membership of the IRA, said he was “innocent of any part” in the killing, which he said was “wrong and a grievous injustice to her and her family”.
Police are investigating abduction and murder of mother of 10 children in 1972
“Well publicised, malicious allegations have been made against me. I reject these,” he said in a statement.
The investigation into Mc-Conville’s killing has been revived by the release of a series of taped interviews given by former guerrillas from the Northern Ireland conflict for a research project at Boston College in the US.
The Northern Ireland police took legal steps to acquire the interviews, parts of which have already been released after one IRA interviewee died. Participants had been told by the college that their words would be released only after they died.
Joe Rice, a Belfast lawyer who has represented senior Republicans over the past three decades, said the tapes would be of little evidential value but would offer a lot of “probative value”, meaning police could play them and demand that Adams respond to details in the recordings.
Nuala O’Loan, a former Northern Ireland police ombudsman who investigated the police’s handling of the murder in 2006, was asked if the Boston tapes would be admissible in court.
“I hesitate to comment as I have not seen these tapes but the indicators are that these are useful as investigative tools but I would not go further than that,” she told the BBC.
Under the 1998 Good Friday agreement, which drew a line under 30 years of sectarian strife in the British province, those convicted of paramilitary murders during the conflict would have their life sentences reduced to two years.
Boston College officials said yesterday they had not been involved in the Irish authorities’ actions. “We are not privy to the actions of British law enforcement and have had no involvement in the matter since the US court issued the order to remand portions of the archived interviews last year,” said Jack Dunn, a spokesman for the college.